We Need a New Science of Progress

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/

by telotortium • 7 years ago

61 99 7 years ago

theatlantic.com

telotortium• 7 years ago

Authors: Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

thedudeabides5• 7 years ago

I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics.

Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.'

Not sure why we need a New Field to study that.

devons• 7 years ago

There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye:

https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063...

It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias.

[1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...

jkingsbery2• 7 years ago

That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)

I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.

antepodius• 7 years ago

I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.

CptFribble• 7 years ago

We don't need a field of study, just a new definition of the word.

Right now progress is More Jobs and More GDP. A lot of people wind up getting left out in the cold because progress jobs and GDP growth don't require helping everyone who needs it.

Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.

dgzl4• 7 years ago

Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.

I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.

DrOctagon2• 7 years ago

I'm curious, what do you think those 'things we have to fix' first are? Why they are a higher priority?

ereyes012• 7 years ago

Your answer makes me assume you are well-fed, educated, and housed (you are of course well connected, since you commented on here).

From an individualist perspective, anyone without those things, but who is connected at least a little will probably want them, I would wager. Is your argument based on a belief that there are not enough natural resources to accommodate every human in theory? What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?

carapace6• 7 years ago

Bucky Fuller calculated that we could achieve this by sometime in the 1970's, if we applied our tech and resources efficiently. ("Therein lies the rub!")

He said that we could work two hours a day, and retire after just a few years, having paid for our living expenses for the rest of one's life.

sprafa• 7 years ago

20-30% of the population in the developed world now produces all the food and housing for the rest of the population. With a 5% increase you could easily create an end to homelessness and malnutrition surely (particularly malnutrition since its most likely a misallocation of resources problem)

mbay• 7 years ago

an extremely Software Dude take: "This hasn't been systematized the way I'm imagining it so it doesn't exist yet."

julienreszka• 7 years ago

Progress is an illusion. No such thing as progress. According to the second law of thermodynamics things can only get worse we can only conserve what is good already before its inevitable decay. Progress is snake oil, eternal yough, perpetual machines, ideal cities and so on : Utopias, scams, wishful thinking at best. All this has the fear of death as a root cause.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

You're not allowed to say these things in tech circles or imply that a person from an older era might prefer it over ours (or god forbid that a modern person might prefer to live an older or less tech-ey lifestyle), or limits to growth...

wsy2• 7 years ago

Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it.

What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?

ereyes012• 7 years ago

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is eventually right in the grander sense, I guess, but conditions for order to emerge from more chaotic circumstances are everywhere, even if order is temporary in the eternal sense. Stars form out of nebulae, heavy elements form out of dying stars, and heavy elements combine to make planets with metals and living things, living things engineer structures, machines, societies, etc.

Progress as we understand it seems to be baked into nature and the emergent systems we live in and are. You don't give up on life as soon as you are born because you will die one day right? Whether you're aware of it or not, your body naturally preserves the order it can, and you actually grow up before you die.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

Soooo ... when you go to the doctor with an ailment, you'd settle for leeches and trepanation, then?

anonymou23• 7 years ago

I would say that progress is stealing from the future generations.

marcus_holmes4• 7 years ago

You need to read more history. We're vastly healthier, wealthier and wiser than our ancestors, and getting better every year.

killjoywashere• 7 years ago

This stuff exists. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (broker), DARPA (demand), every company (demand) and every company's R&D division (supply). The problem is there's 7 billion people, and fully half of them are above average. The demand signalers are constantly hunting for supply, while the suppliers are constantly hunting for buyers. It takes radical amounts of cross-training to have any hope of comprehending the available possibilities.

carapace6• 7 years ago

This is the program of the Bavarian Illuminati.

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

carapace6• 7 years ago

Sorry. While partially meant as an in-joke for Robert Anton Wilson fans, I'm actually serious: the is no mention of religion or spirituality in the program outlined. To me it seems relevant (or at least interesting) both that this is a purely secular or materialist concept of progress; and that it's hardly "New".

libraryofbabel• 7 years ago

Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong?

In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, like the history of science and technology, addressing precisely the questions that they're asking.

bobcostas55• 7 years ago

They don't ignore them at all, they explain why having this stuff spread over a large number of non-communicating disciplines is bad.

buboard3• 7 years ago

My guess is they are looking for the actual answers, not just endless discussions.

aylmao2• 7 years ago

Isn't this what philosophy in government and economics are? I took a Critical Theory course in college. We read Kant, Hagel, Marx, Marcuse and Adorno, and that's what their writing is all about— what all this we call "progress" is even progressing towards and what that means for the world, for individuals, etc.

I feel like the United States has just forsaken philosophy, especially as it relates to economics, in favour of their Chicago School theories of free markets. Now that the markets have been let to run free, and they're running towards nothing good in particular, perhaps it's time to just look back at all the literature written elsewhere on these matters.

jkingsbery2• 7 years ago

Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls.

I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.

aylmao2• 7 years ago

Glad to see someone actually comment and not just downvote haha.

Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls.

I agree with this actually. The federal government does move the pieces quite a bit and there's definitely people who think it could be even more free. Though to be fair, I'm thinking about this in relation to other countries like some in Europe, for example. In that context, I get the sense the US is more scared of regulation and in general prefers letting the market decide.

For example, plastic bags. The UK has introduced a charge on them, and is going to enforce a ban soon. In the US you see less action in this direction, and the general trend I see to fight the issue is "lets educate the population so they crate demand for alternative options".

IMO, what the UK is doing is progress— they've identified the moral obligation to take better care of the environment and through policy they're altering the market to work towards it. The US seems to prefer to "progress" according to market demand. If this idea is to be made policy, first it has to be demanded by the market. I could be wrong though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯

This is of course at a Federal level, because at a state and municipal level I do hear of more independent action taken in the US.

I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.

That's true. I'm not arguing for the adoption of societies modeled after the ideas of Marx, which are notoriously vague. I'm more just making the case that there's previous literature reflecting on what "progress" is, and arguing that perhaps it's not just increasing GDP without bounds.

superqwert• 7 years ago

Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.

dredmorbius5• 7 years ago

By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.

Given in TFA's third paragraph.

hacknat2• 7 years ago

Well I can definitely tear down this definition. “Advancement” doesn’t mean anything. What does it mean to advance culturally or organizationally without already having morality defined?

Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay?

The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.

rohan_shah2• 7 years ago

Increasing the standard of living for people in your country by lowering the standard of living for people living in Africa doesn't much sound like "progress for everyone",does it?

Don't tell me that increased population doesn't decrease standard of living.

pcmaffey• 7 years ago

Isn’t progress quite simply, evolution? We study it so we can apply it intentionally.

The philosophical part to me is Who is this progress meant to serve? Everyone alive today? The human species as a whole? Our environment? Some greater consciousness?

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

It depends on how progress is defined. Technically it implies movement towards some end-state wheather it is obtainable or not. Disease outbreaks are a progression technically but in this context it is limited to positive changes.

Evolution itself doesn't neccessarily fit - while it may progress it may also stagnate or get caught in cycles. While a result may eventually dominate it is important to remember evolution has no goals - it is literal survivorship bias manifest.

As for intent I believe the answer is an unsatisfying "it depends" as who it serves and who defines meaning changes and the question becomes originally or currently? Musket arming of minimally trained recruits may have been meant to serve aristocracy to allow fielding large armies cheaper but if it ends in them being deposed clearly it didn't serve them in the end and the purpose must change or else be abandoned.

dredmorbius5• 7 years ago

That's an argument to be made, but there are still questions of mechanisms, dynamics, limits, etc.

Darwin proposed evolution. Mendel hypothsized genes. Crick and Watson discovered DNA's structure. Details matter.

marcus_holmes4• 7 years ago

I'm about 2/3 of the way through AntiFragile, and so scoffing at the whole idea that academic institutions or scholarly study produce or contribute to progress at all. What we need is not more academics, but the reinstatement of the apprenticeship system.

inflatableDodo2• 7 years ago

I guess that depends on your idea of progress. To be honest, reinstating the apprenticeship system sounds a little circular and also quite difficult to achieve, now that companies have got used to not bearing the cost of education in a lot of areas. You'd either have to regulate business massively, or shut down a lot of public education. I'd be more inclined to try something novel, like an international federated organisation dedicated to free education and open research, or something.

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

Two characteristics of a city are systematically associated with the appearance of significant figures who grow up there: whether the city is a political or financial center, regardless of its population, and whether the city is the location of an elite university. The effect of these latter two variables is quite large. As the last column indicates, being a political or financial center increased the expected number of significant figures by 64 percent, holding everything else constant, while having an elite university increased that expected number by 184 percent.

Human Accomplishment: Charles Murray, page 369

More generally this critique ignores the second industrial revolution altogether. The U.K. shows progress outside universities is possible, as does the preceding industrious revolution, where water and wind power and the beginnings of steam happened with minimal involvement from universities but progress in chemistry and electricity generation and electrical engineering was absolutely a product of the technical university system. That’s why Germany was at the forefront of this era of rapid progress and the U.K. wasn’t despite its huge initial advantage in capital.

mattkrause2• 7 years ago

You know how academia works, right? It and the trades are the only apprentice systems going…

pmyteh• 7 years ago

This is true. A PhD is very close to an apprenticeship model: study at the feet of an expert doing simple work, prove your competence (master's degree/prelims) to start working on your own account under supervision, finally submit masterwork (PhD thesis) to be counted as an expert yourself.

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

And yet that is the opposite of what has contributed to success. Countries can do without apprenticeships and have success. They cannot do without academia and do the same.

Even if there are useless members within the whole system can still be positive. The whole model of venture capitalism is technically very wasteful from all of the failures - but the outsized successes more than pay for the failures.

It is a common mistake in a pattern of thinking that "If I cannot understand how it works then it must be bad." By all means question and be skeptical but assuming that is an increasingly bad heuristic as specialization grows.

bumbledraven• 7 years ago

The physicist David Deutsch wrote a superb book about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress and those that lead to regress. It's called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC

onion2k• 7 years ago

Progress itself is understudied.

Every historian in the world would dispute that.

ksdale• 7 years ago

I suspect many historians also believe that people don't pay nearly enough attention to history.

dredmorbius5• 7 years ago

Economists especially.

ArtWomb• 7 years ago

This perfectly captures the zeitgeist and my current thinking. Globally, we need a 10x basic research expenditure increase, with specific allocation to long-term (life) grants for breakthrough investigations. Establishment of geographic concentrations or hubs of interest (eg. WallStreet proximity to fintech knowledge, DC corridor for cybersecurity experience, Boston biotech, etc). As well as radical change in nurture and support for key talent. And re-calibration of end focus on improving everyday lives and alleviating hardship.

The one feather in our cap is the distribution of new discovery. As the original research mission behind the invention of the internet, it has surpassed expectation. The black hole image at the center of the Milky Way galaxy was captured, processed and released (via twitter) in under a news cycle.

buboard3• 7 years ago

Thats the VC fallacy of believing that filling the tank with money will make the car go faster. If anything , progress in recent decades is anticorrelated with increase in funding

buboard3• 7 years ago

When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting.

I have had a few recent exchanges with anthropologists and it doesn't seem they are interested in moralistic claims apart from defending the current academic framework. For example they were highly skeptical of science when it doesn't support the "nurture" side on the nature vs nurture debate, discarding scientific evidence as invalid using weak arguments. It was surprising to me how prevalent and an orthodoxy this is, and it seems they have contracted the relativistic disease that is prevalent in the social sciences for decades. I suppose most agree that progress is not an implied good (Plenty of comments here express that view). Pity because anthropology is IMO the most interesting social science.

As for measuring progress in science, the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are content with the current system of small unambitious steps, low risks and easy content-free papers, so you won't easily find many supporters there.

zemo• 7 years ago

It's literally only the tech community that thinks that "Progress itself is understudied". People who work in the humanities have been studying these topics since antiquity, and they have been desperately trying to get people in the STEM fields to listen, only to be ignored.

read the responses to The Atlantic tweeting this out. https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632

there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress

The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. I'm sure we can all come together and agree on a single definition of progress, right? Seems so straightforward.

This article is embarrassingly dismissive of other fields.

lvoudour• 7 years ago

You perfectly articulated what I wanted to write but couldn't find the right words. Reinventing the wheel is one thing, but reinventing it and adding corners to it is just embarrassing.

skmurphy• 7 years ago

I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful:

Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"

Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"

Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"

James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"

David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"

Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"

We Need a New Science of Progress

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